An Enhanced Data-Reduction Algorithm for Event-Triggered Networks

As functionality of vehicles increases in complexity, the demand on the in-vehicle networks increases as well. Maximum bus utilization often becomes the communication bottleneck. One way to satisfy the high bandwidth requirement for future vehicles is to use a higher bandwidth bus or multiple buses. However, the use of a higher bandwidth bus increases the cost of the network. Similarly, the use of multiple buses increases the cost as well as the complexity of wiring and network handling. Both options are becoming solutions to high bandwidth demand. An alternative option is the development of a higher layer protocol that uses data-reduction (DR) techniques to reduce the amount of data to be transferred. Its goal is to communicate the same amount of information using less bus bandwidth. It would be acceptable, provided that it does not increase the message latencies significantly so that the safety of the vehicle is not compromised. The cost of the protocol is expected to be marginal because it consists of one-time changes to software. Various DR algorithms are available in the literature, but DR technology has not been introduced in in-vehicle protocol standards. This paper presents a unique DR methodology, along with its comparison with other proposed methodologies. The performance of this new DR algorithm is found to be better than that of the existing DR algorithms for a wide range of signal dynamics. The cost, as well as the impact of this protocol on the end-to-end message latency, has been found to be very marginal.